Utopia, you are standing in it!

Parliament is currently in recess but its work continues, with select committees moving to remote hearings, and the Speaker promising to move, if only temporarily, towards a ‘virtual parliament’. David Natzler, who spent almost 40 years working in the House of Commons, draws on his experience to suggest how issues relating to the remote conduct of oral questions, voting, committees, and other key matters, might be resolved before parliament returns in late April.

In my blog of 23 March, I suggested that parliament would be judged on how well it had dealt with COVID-19. Over the past fortnight parliament has passed the Coronavirus Act and Commons select committees have held several hearings (see below) in procedurally unique circumstances. Developments in other parliaments and institutions have given an indication of how Westminster might adapt in the coming months. And there have been growing calls for business – in …

The wind and solar industries face an existential threat, with governments throwing every available resource at resuscitating their economies, instead of pandering to the renewable energy sector. The Draconian measures adopted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 mean that governments have a choice.

Throw taxpayer’s dollars at filthy rich wind and solar power outfits (which have wallowed in hundreds of $billions in subsidies over the last 20 years).

Or to provide general economic stimulus – in the form of welfare to the masses of recently unemployed and subsidies and support to keep businesses afloat and their workers employed – that might allow their countries to recover from state enforced lockdowns, with some degree of dignity.

No prizes for guessing which choice is the more palatable from a political perspective.

Proving themselves, yet again, to be tin-eared mouthpieces for the wind and solar lobby, US Democrats pulled out all stops in…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a new book, her fifth, and the fourth to have a one-word title (the others are The Caged Virgin, Nomad, Infidel, and Heretic, and I’ve read all but the first). The last one, Heretic, was subtitled Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, and was her manifesto not to destroy Islam (which many think is her agenda), but to reform it from within. I wrote about it previously, and thought that while the motivation was good, Muslims would never accept Hirsi Ali’s five suggestions for reforming the faith (example: “Muslims must not take the Qur’an literally”).

If Islam is to be defanged, making the extremist and violence-prone segments go away, it not only has to be from within, but there’s no good program for doing it—even from Hirsi Ali, who spent much of her life as an ardent believer.

And…

With coronavirus sucking all the air out of room globally, I got interested in looking at how the Canadian national flu seasons compare with the new Wuhan virus. The analysis is important since there are many nations at higher latitudes that are in equilibrium relative to infectious diseases, but vulnerable to outbreaks of new viruses. Where I live in Canada, we have winter outbreaks every year, but are protected by a combination of sanitary practices, health care system and annual vaccines, contributing to herd immunity.

For example, 2018-19 was a slightly higher than typical year, with this pattern:
The various flu types are noted, all together making a total of 48,818 influenza detections during the 2018-19 season. A total of 946 hospitalizations were reported by CIRN-SOS sentinels that season (age = or >16).  Source:  Annual Influenza Reports

A total of 137 (14%) ICU admissions and 65 (7%) deaths were reported. …

One straw, up one turtle’s nostril, and here we are, on the road to banning all plastics … Typical!

The activist feeding frenzy against plastic has been going on for decades but with the recent images being multiplied on social media and the BBC it has reached its hyperbolic zenith this year. The calls to do something – the sense of urgency – to ban plastic (from straws to bags to packaging to, well, … anything and everything) has come to encompass the latest social media episode of Age of Stupid insanity. You might go to prison in California for serving someone a straw.

The drive to ban plastics, now being spearheaded by those who should know better in the European Commission, has become a cause célèbre for all activists. What’s not to like about this latest attack on technology?

1. Plastic is not a natural product. Enough said…